If you read the paper you will see that the authors do not mention Y-DNA haplogroups I, J, E, or indeed any other found in Europe except G2a, because that is the only one for which we have enough ancient DNA to be significant. And what is most significant about it is that this is not the most common Y-DNA haplogroup in modern Europe. OK we don't really have enough ancient Y-DNA yet to be drawing really solid conclusions. We don't have any published yet from hunter-gatherers. But they stick their necks out and say (about all this G2a in Neolithic Europeans) that "this result suggests that the spacial structure of European genetic variation was not fixed in the Neolithic but continued to be reshaped by subsequent demographic processes." Translation into Miles-speak: R1b and R1a must have arrived/spread widely later. Probably. We think.

No they don't spell out in so many words that the common Y-DNA haplogroups in Europe today are R1b and R1a. But anyone as well-versed in these matters as yourself does not need to be told that surely. They know that. You know that. All of us here know that. Personally I do spell matters out for the complete newcomer. But then I'm addressing the general reader. In a book.

I enjoyed the paper. It is an excellent summary of the state of things at this point and is well written, with a helpful glossary of terms at the beginning. The approach was even handed and as objective as humanly possible.

While we're on the subject of Sykes, what about his book "the seven daughters of Eve"? I've heard that his work hasn't been supported by ancient DNA, as the lineages he says are Paleolithic in Europe are non-existent or rarer than they are now so far.

Seven Daughters of Eve has been completely overturned. But Sykes does have the excuse that it was created out of very, very limited data at that time on a very, very limited range of haplogroups. Very little was known about mtDNA in the Near East or indeed anywhere else very much. So things that seem obvious to us now were not obvious to Sykes. For example it is pretty clear now that U5 was born in Europe, but not U. From U in the Near East, some people went south in to North Africa, where U6 arose, while others moved into Europe, where U5 arose. So scrap Ursula's birth on Mount Parnasus. And so on. The only one of the origin locations he pictures for his seven daughters that is still holding up is Jasmine in the Near East, but his date is wrong. The latest estimate for J is long before farming.

By the time Seven Daughters was published in 2001, things were getting a bit clearer. Indeed Sykes had been one of the co-authors on Richards et al 2000, Tracing European Founder Lineages in the Near Eastern mtDNA Pool. The text for Seven Daughters was probably written well before publication.

Thanks for the reply. Although the origins and spread of mtDNA is harder to track as their distribution is more homogeneous, what are your current beliefs on the possible origins of the major haplogroups in Europe?

A broad outline appears to be that H = Neolithic farmer and U = Paleolithic hunter gatherer, but it appears both clades were present albeit at lower frequencies in both populations. There are also mtDNA hgs which appear to correlate with the spread of Indo-European.

You can see for yourself in Ancient Western Eurasian DNA that the only mtDNA haplogroups that have been assigned with certainty to Europeans before the spread of farming into Europe are U and subclades of U. Some other subclades appear in groups who were still hunter-gatherers, but long after farming had arrived, and living cheek by jowl with farmers. So we can guess that these other haplogroups came from farming people. (It is possible that there was some HV and/or R0, but testing was too limited in these cases to be sure.)

So things are a whole lot simpler and more clear-cut than most of us expected. Even those of us who were extremely sceptical of the Sykes vision were bowled over by the first ancient DNA studies to give these clear results.

By the end of the Neolithic all the mtDNA haplogroups common in Europe today had arrived in Europe, but they were not necessarily spread around in the same proportions and places as they are now. By the end of the Bronze Age the picture is a lot closer to that of modern Europeans.

A recent study on mtDNA gives a TRMCA date for H of just over 12,000 years, which correlates surprisingly well with the period just before the beggining of agriculture. It could be theorized that the H woman/women was among the first peoples to practise farming, thus giving her a population boost versus non-agricultural mtDNAs.

However, Dienekes has noted that the mutation rate assumed a Human-Chimp divergence rate of 7 million years. A new paper has put this at atleast 7-8 million years and as much as 13 million. Even if we (less than) double it though H is likely less than 20,000 years old.

Here's the TRMCAS from A “Copernican” Reassessment of the Human Mitochondrial DNA Tree from its Root supplemental table 5

Yes I know. I keep an eye on the papers that Dienekes helpfully draws our attention to.

But the date of a mutation is not the same as the date that said mutation arrives in any particular place (other than the one it was born in). mtDNA H could have been born in the Near East at any date you please, but it will not immediately fly to every point on the globe.

So estimates for particular haplogroups are just one factor to bear in mind. We also need to think about evidence for migration, and most especially ancient DNA, which is solid proof of arrival. Even then lineages can die out, so that people today of a particular haplogroop could be descended from a later arrival than the one we see in aDNA. All very complex. But interesting.

My mtDNA haplogroup is H1C1. If I plot it's defining mutations back to H, based on aDNA found, I find an interesting overlap with the defining mutations of my Y DF21 back to M269. Which raises the interesting question, did they migrate together or more probably were they random meetings. Where and when did they overlap. Has anybody looked at the overlap between mtDNA And Y SNPs and in particular H and R1b.

My mtDNA haplogroup is H1C1. If I plot it's defining mutations back to H, based on aDNA found, I find an interesting overlap with the defining mutations of my Y DF21 back to M269. Which raises the interesting question, did they migrate together or more probably were they random meetings. Where and when did they overlap. Has anybody looked at the overlap between mtDNA And Y SNPs and in particular H and R1b.

Yes I know. I keep an eye on the papers that Dienekes helpfully draws our attention to.

But the date of a mutation is not the same as the date that said mutation arrives in any particular place (other than the one it was born in). mtDNA H could have been born in the Near East at any date you please, but it will not immediately fly to every point on the globe.

So estimates for particular haplogroups are just one factor to bear in mind. We also need to think about evidence for migration, and most of this PhenQ review especially ancient DNA, which is solid proof of arrival. Even then lineages can die out, so that people today of a particular haplogroop could be descended from a later arrival than the one we see in aDNA. All very complex. But interesting.

The very fact that Sykes book was written for the BNP shows that he has an agenda. I don't trust anything by someone who has a bias.